When Dr. Ben Carson comes to Anchorage for a speaking engagement next week, local educators arranged for him to also appear in a school assembly at Mountain View Elementary School, one of the most diverse schools in the nation.
After all, Dr. Carson was a kid once and attended a school just like Mountain View. Now, he’s a brain surgeon.
But Dr. Carson won’t be able to speak at the school. The superintendent has put his foot down on the school assembly, which was scheduled to take place during the first full week of classes.
Carson served as the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump Administration. He ran for president in 2016. He is also an accomplished brain surgeon, having performed the first successful separation of conjoined twins who were attached at the back of the head.
Carson, now with no future plans for politics, is the coauthor of a book published last fall on education: “Crisis in the Classroom,” written alongside Armstrong Williams, and famed civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump.
Carson said the book was conceived due to discovering that “people from multiple viewpoints who all felt the same: That the school system was failing the children, and if they’re failing the children, they’re failing our nation.”
In November interview, Carson said the “havoc and chaos currently plaguing our society have many of their roots in the dismal educational environment that has been allowed to fester in many communities throughout our nation. We really need to be talking about this and not just sweeping it under the rug.”
But Dr. Jharrett Bryantt, who has been superintendent of Anchorage schools for 16 months, is not, evidently a Carson appreciator. He said nyet to the visit.
A request to the school district to verify the claim that Dr. Carson is being banned from the Anchorage schools has gone unanswered, but credible sources tell Must Read Alaska that the arrangement had been made with the school principal, and when the Bryantt learned of the visit, he personally intervened and disallowed it.
Dr. Carson will be speaking at Cornerstone Church Aug. 22 as the keynoter for a fundraising evening with the Anchorage Republican Women’s Club. Gov. Mike Dunleavy is said to have helped arrange for the Carson visit to Alaska and will be accompanying Carson during at least some of his time in the state. Word is that a trip to a school in the Matanuska-Borough School District is in planning stages.
